


When the Rain Comes

by rosa_himmelblau



Category: Starsky & Hutch
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-08-14 11:08:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8011336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_himmelblau/pseuds/rosa_himmelblau
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The rain, the flu, and other things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Rain Comes

The rainy season in Los Angeles always depressed Starsky and the rainy season had come again.  
  
Saturday had drifted in, the gray clouds making it barely distinguishable from the night.  Starsky had risen in an overcast gloom, not sure if it was even still morning until he checked the clock.  It was just past ten.  Hutch would be home in just over twenty-nine hours.  
  
Starsky took his shower without turning on a light, the drops of water falling on him in the day's deep murk as the raindrops fell against the bathroom window.  
  
Out of the shower, he turned on the light and picked up his toothbrush, watching himself in the mirror as tooth paste foam rose in his mouth like foam on a cappuccino.  His reflection watched back.  When his teeth were clean, he covered his face with shaving cream and watched as he scraped it away.  Distantly, thunder roared.  
  
Clean and dry, Starsky turned out the light and went to the bedroom to dress.  He put on old jeans and a drab gray sweater that matched the dark and cloudy day.  
  
The morning newspaper was soggy when he brought it in from the front porch, so Starsky spread it out by the heating vent to dry.  Then he headed to the kitchen for breakfast.  
  
Without his partner there to chide him, Starsky grabbed the Fruit Loops from the top cupboard shelf, poured himself a glass of orange juice, and headed for the living room.  
  
He flopped down on the sofa and flipped the TV on with the remote, switching stations 'til he found the tail end of a Cagney-Bogart movie. He ate handfuls of colorful cereal until Bogey was dead. When the end credits had rolled, he searched for something else to watch but found nothing but people talking about things he wasn't interested in.  He turned off the TV.  
  
Starsky hated rainy days except when he could spend them in bed with his sunshiny partner. Life was boring without Hutch around.  
  
He briefly regretted his decision not to go with his partner to the criminal science and forensics seminar.  He had been looking forward to going to San Diego and spending the weekend in a hotel room with his beautiful partner, but Tuesday morning he'd awakened with a fever of a hundred and two.  
  
Hutch had nursed him—Hutch always nursed him—through the fever and the vomiting, through the chills and the pounding headache, through the achyness and the diarrhea.  By Friday morning, the symptoms were gone, leaving Starsky utterly wrung out.  
  
After lunch—Hutch made chicken soup from Starsky's mother's prescription-strength recipe—Starsky told Hutch he'd better get a move on if he wanted to beat the traffic.  Hutch had tried to back out, of course, but Starsky had insisted.  "You've been looking forward to this ever since the memo went around. Anyway, you know I'll learn more from you telling me about it than I would from listening to a boring bunch of eggheads.  This'll work out great."  
  
It had been the right choice.  But he still felt crummy and it seemed like this bleak weekend would never end.  
  
Starsky took his orange juice glass back to the kitchen and washed it, watching the rain through the kitchen window.  He dried the glass and put it away, then stood there for a few minutes listening to the rain patter-patter-patter and watching drips drop into and bounce up from a puddle.  Then he took the glass back out and poured himself some more orange juice.  
  
Maybe there was a movie he could go to, that wouldn't take much energy.  He could choose something Hutch wouldn't be interested in so he wouldn't feel bad about it.  The newspaper ought to be dry by now.  
  
It was.  Starsky flipped on the reading lamp next to Hutch's favorite chair and sat down with the movie section, sipping his orange juice while he read.  There were lots of movies out there—lots of movies Hutch would play snobby about and that Starsky thought looked pretty good.  There was one about a cannibal who lived in the woods that he'd wanted to see, only looking at the ad now, he couldn't work up any enthusiasm.  It wasn't much fun doing stuff without Hutch, even stuff Hutch bitched about, even stuff he was only doing because Hutch wanted to.    
  
He checked the sports page.  The Lakers had lost the night before.  Starsky flipped to the comics.  Beethoven's birthday was coming.  
  
When he was done with the paper, Starsky turned out the light, letting the day's dimness settle back over the room.  He gathered up the newspaper sections and put them in the trash.  
  
Earlier it had seemed as though the day was brightening a bit, but now dark hovered smoke, and the rain came down harder.  When the lights were on, the room seemed too bright, but when they were off, it was too dark to do anything but nap. That was what Starsky hated about rainy days. That, and the rain.  
  
Maybe he should cook something.  Starsky opened the refrigerator, letting its light illuminate the room as he took inventory.  Carrots and celery, stoplight peppers, zucchini and summer squash, tomatoes, mushrooms, parsley, spinach, rosemary and barley.  Just what he needed to make the vegetarian soup Hutch liked so much.  He could spend the day chopping and cooking.  
  
So he assembled all the ingredients on the small kitchen table, got a knife and cutting board and the big pot.  He peered at it all in the murky darkness, got up, and turned on the overhead light.  He picked up a mushroom, pulled out the stem and was about to cut it up when the phone rang.  Maybe it was his partner.  Starsky got up and grabbed the receiver off the wall.  
  
"Hello?"  
  
"Is Betty there?" a man's voice asked.  
  
"Sorry, wrong number," Starsky said.  He heard the man's "sorry," as he was putting the receiver back.  
  
The phone call had interrupted what little momentum Starsky had.  He felt too tired to cook.  He picked up the mushroom stem and ate it.  
  
Maybe there was something on TV.  
  
He found the tail end of an old Hawaii-50 episode followed by an episode of Kojak.  But after that came a discussion about "upcoming changes in the city landscape with some of the city's leading thinkers."  The other channels didn't have anything better.  Starsky shut off the TV.  
  
Thunder pummeled the sodden air, lightning cracked through the raindrops, and the lights flickered and went out, leaving Starsky in cheerless shadows.  He reached over to flip on a lamp, but of course nothing happened.  
  
No TV.  No lights.  Starsky pushed the button to illuminate his watch dial.  It was just past noon.  Maybe he should go to the movies.  Or to The Pits, spend the afternoon with Huggy.  
  
Only he didn't want to, and he still didn't feel all that terrific.  His head hurt.  Maybe he should go back to bed.  
  
Starsky walked to the bedroom.   He looked out the window at the black clouds, the desolate, sodden trees, the dreary puddles.  The heavy rain fell in gray sheets.  No lights showed in the windows of the houses he could see.  Starsky pulled the curtains shut tight and climbed into bed.  With the covers over his head, he could barely hear the rain pounding on the roof.  
  
He fell asleep.  
  
  
It was twilight when Starsky woke up.  The joyless rain was still falling.  
  
He threw back the covers and got out of bed, shivering; the house had grown cold in the hours he'd been asleep.  Starsky tried the beside lamp but got nothing but the click of the light switch. The power was still out.  That's why it had gotten so cold; the heat couldn't come on until the power did.  
  
Starsky moved carefully through the murky house.  He and Hutch had only been living there for eight months and at first they'd argued about the furniture.  The argument had started over what to keep and what to get rid of.  Those battles were won through stealth and Hutch started it. One of Starsky's chairs disappeared. Hutch claimed to have no idea where it had gone and even offered to take a report on Starsky's poor, stolen chair.  After that, it was war.  
  
Once they'd winnowed each other's possessions down to what their new home could comfortably hold, the furniture's mysterious disappearances stopped, but they started arguing about what should go where.  Then, as if by mutual assent, they quit shouting at each other and just rearranged the furniture without consulting each other.  Now that had mostly stopped, but Starsky still wasn't entirely confident about where things were in the darkish living room.  
  
There were candles somewhere but Starsky wasn't sure if they were in the living room or the kitchen.  That was another thing they'd argued about.  Arguing was half the fun of living with Hutch.  
  
There were two candles in the bottom drawer of an end table.  Starsky lit one and made his way to the kitchen where he found a saucer to mount his candle on.  
  
If he'd thought there was nothing to do before, now it was worse.  It was well and truly dark and there wasn't even boring TV to watch.  The blackness was making him claustrophobic, it was like being buried alive, just him and his candle that was sucking up all the oxygen.  He was held prisoner by the never-ending rain.  
  
The thunder pounded, reminding him who was in charge; the lightning taunted him with a momentary glimpse of the room he sat in, then another as the thunder rattled the windows, threatening to let in the rain.  
  
Starsky made his careful way to the bathroom where the aspirin bottle wasn't.  It had been there; he'd put it there, but Hutch had moved it to the kitchen.  Another one of his partner's odd ideas, that the only reason people kept drugs and first aid stuff in the bathroom was that there was running water there, but the same was true of the kitchen and you were more likely to injure yourself in the kitchen than the bathroom—at least, in a way that required the kind of first aid you could do at home.  Starsky didn't disagree with that, really; he just couldn't remember not to look in the bathroom first.  
  
He went back to the kitchen.  The aspirin was in the little cupboard by the back door.  Starsky opened the dark refrigerator and found the orange juice carton.  He took a slug with two aspirin, then took the bottle of orange juice back to the living room.  He wrapped himself in the ugly khaki and brown afghan Hutch had let him keep because he told him his grandmother made it.  That was a lie; it had belonged to his grandmother, but she hadn't made it.  Mostly he liked it because of how warm it was.  
  
Starsky sipped orange juice.  The dark and the warmth and the murmur of the now-gentle rain were making him sleepy, or maybe it was lethargic.  Either way, he didn't feel like dying in a house fire right then, so he blew out his candle.  
  
Soon he was asleep again.  
  
  
"Starsk?  Starsky?  Are you OK?"  
  
He was lying on the sofa with his legs hanging off. Hutch knelt next to him, his voice urgent.  
  
"What time is it?"  The room was full of light so the power must be back on.  
  
"Close to two.  Why were you sitting on the sofa in the dark?"  
  
"The power went off.  I took a nap but it was still out when I woke up so I went back to sleep.  What are you doing home?"  The lamp was right behind Hutch's head, making it look as though  he was lighting the room with his golden hair.  
  
"It was boring," Hutch said, then, "I missed you."  
  
"Is it still raining?" Starsky asked, then before Hutch could answer, "It doesn't matter."  And he reached up and pulled his partner close.


End file.
